Organize + Energize: What’s Going on in Your Office?
Tuesday, April 10, 2018
Take a minute here and look around. You spend so much time in your office that sometimes the clutter starts to blend into the walls and you become numb to it.
At first glance, you see a cluttered desk, a bulletin board full of papers, cluttered bookshelves, and random piles on the floor. It’s chaos. Then you take a step into the office and stand over the desk. It’s cluttered with paper piles everywhere, random files scattered on the desk, chatzkies all over the desk and sticky notes stuck to the computer. Business cards are thrown all over the desk. A cup sits on the desk with above 20 writing instruments, half probably don’t work and most never get used.
Inside the drawers, it’s chaos. You’re not utilizing drawer organizers and you try to find a binder clip and it takes you a few minutes to locate one. You haven’t purged your files in years, there is no system and the files aren’t even hanging in the drawers. It takes you 15 minutes to locate an important file.
Now, you start to wonder if there is money in any form on the desk. You start to wonder if there are missed business opportunities in those piles. You think about how long it takes you to locate a file or important document. You start to sweat because now you’re thinking about all the time you’ve wasted due to your disorganization. You think about how much money you’ve lost and how many clients you may have lost due to your disorganization. How does this make you feel?
If this overwhelms and stresses you out, you’re not alone. Before you even think about getting organized, you have to get past this feeling. People get stuck in all different areas of the organizing process. You may have trouble getting started or you get started but get stuck with the process of decluttering. You may make it through decluttering but then you get distracted and lose focus and after an hour, you’ve moved onto something else. Some make it through all of this but then get stuck when they begin the organizing process because they don’t have the skill set. You may make it all the way through but the little things frustrate you and can’t figure out what to do with them. Then, there are the people who make it through the entire process, but just can’t seem to maintain their organization, which is one of the biggest steps in the process.
One of the first things you need to do is recognize where you get stuck. Once you recognize that, you can move forward with a detailed plan. You can’t tackle a large project if you can organize a drawer. Start with your drawer. Take everything out of the drawer. Make your piles of keep, toss, and move to another area. Wipe out your drawer and take measurements of height, width, and length. Take a picture of what you’re keeping. Look at the empty drawer and think about how you want to function going forward. Think about functionality and how often you’re grabbing these items and how you want to organize them. Go to the store with your picture and measurements and purchase drawer organizers to match what you need to hold that will fit the space. In a nutshell, this is the process to get organized. The process is the same for everybody, but when you start creating systems, that’s where everybody functions differently. Everybody’s system will be different based on how they function. That’s where you really have to start asking questions about functionality.
Don’t let the task of getting organized hold you back from functioning at your highest level. Don’t let this ruin you as a business owner. Make the time to evaluate how you’re functioning and put a plan into motion to get organized and become more efficient and productive.
Related Slideshow: 10 Areas You Find Most Challenging to Get Organized
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